Family Reunion

(at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City)

By ROBERT EDWARD BULLOCK, Special to the Sun | April 25, 2014

For the first time in nearly 230 years, a family of six from Madrid is spending time together. In "Goya and the Altamira Family" the Metropolitan Museum of Art unites a set of portraits commissioned by the Count of Altamira, the director of what is now the Banco de España. This small grouping highlights some of Goya's peculiar grandeur and melancholy.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, b.1746, was a fabulously successful court painter in Madrid, a portraitist of the royal family and the Spanish aristocracy. Numbered among the last of the Old Masters while being the premier Modernist, his work possesses the repeating minor chord of a somber melody, as even his bright colors hold some tone of lament.

(Read the entire review at The New York Sun.)

^ Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), 1746-1828, "Vicente Joaquín Osorio Moscoso y Guzmán, 12th Conde de Altamira (1756-1816)," 1787 (Banco de España, Madrid.)

^ Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), 1746-1828, "Maria Ignacia Álvarez de Toledo, Condesa de Altamira and Her Daughter, MaríaAgustina," 1787-88 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection)

^ Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), 1746-1828, "Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (1784-1792)," 1787-88               (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jules Bache Collection)

^ Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), 1746-1828, "Vicente Osorio de Moscoso, Count of Trastamara" (Private Collection)

^ Esteve Y Marques "Portrait of Juan Maria Osorio" (Cleveland Museum of Art)

Hildesheim's Medieval Splendor

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery 521: Special Exhibition)

Hildesheim's Medieval Splendor 

by Robert Edward Bullock, Special to the Sun

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Twelfth-century Europe was a complex and varied culture of often overlapping religion, politics, and private life. This is reflected in the arts of the period, a high-water mark of imagination and craftsmanship. Like other cultures of deep and widely held faith, Medieval Europe - Christendom - created precious objects that, born of such high sentiments, were like prayers rendered in gold, silver, and precious stones.

Works of art delivered the Christian message by glorifying the Holy. Just as in the Torah, where God instructs the Jews to use "the purest gold" in the temple, the most precious materials were appropriate in the service of the Catholic Church. In his “De Consecratione,” the twelfth-century abbot of St-Denis, Abbot Suger, praised the working of gold and silver and precious stones to "conjoinest the material with the immaterial, the corporeal with the spiritual, the human with the Divine". 

Sparkling like King Solomon's mines, "Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim" is the Metropolitan Museum's dazzling new exhibit of church furnishings and treasures from Hildesheim Cathedral in Germany's Lower Saxony region. Consecrated in 872 and designated a UNESCO world cultural heritage site in 1985 along with Saint Michael's Church in Hildesheim, its collection of .....

(read the full review at The New York Sun)

Reichenau Gospel Lectionary and Collectar, ca. 1010–30 (Dombibliothek Hildesheim; Photograph by Lutz Engelhardt)

Ringelheim Crucifix, ca. 1000 / before 1022 (Dom-Museum Hildesheim, on loan from the church of Sts. Abdon and Sennen, Salzgitter- Ringelheim)

Reliquary of Saint Oswald, ca. 1185–89; partly restored 1779 (Dom-Museum Hildesheim; Photograph by Lutz Engelhardt)

Flesh and Shadow

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery 602: European Paintings)

Flesh and Shadow

by Robert Edward Bullock, Special to the Sun

Two paintings currently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art provide a glimpse of the achievements and the variety of subjects in seventeenth-century Italian painting. A fertile and creative artistic environment gave birth to some of the greatest talents in Western art that, like constellations of bright stars, cause us to stop and stare nearly four hundred years later.

Alongside scenes from the Bible and saints lives were those from ancient mythology, such as Danaë. Confined to a tower as a virgin by her father, the king, because of a prophecy that he would be killed by the son she would bear, Danaë is visited by the god Jupiter, who appears as a shower of gold and lays with her for the night. Their son, Perseus, grows to one day behead Medusa and to accidentally kill his grandfather. 

Orazio Gentileschi (b.1563) dramatizes the story's key event with mannerist effect. His "Danaë" (ca.1621) shows the princess full and fertile, the classical ideal, reclining on a royal bed against the enveloping shadows as a putto clumsily raises the heavy drapery, bathed in the light of the divine. The veil separating the worlds of gods and men is, in effect, momentarily .....

(read the full review at The New York Sun)

"Danaë" by Orazio Gentileschi. Oil on canvas, ca.1621. Private collection on temporary loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

"St Dominic in Penitence" by Filippo Tarchiani. Oil on canvas, no date given (first quarter of 17th-century). Private collection on temporary loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Medieval Art Collection. Notes of May 24, 2013, 6:30 PM)

(^ Saint Peter as the First Pope. ca. before 1348. Spain. Pine partially covered with canvas, gesso, paint. 79 x 22.5 x 13″. Rogers Fund, 1926/ Accession Number: 27.18.2)                             

I watch as one person after another takes pictures of this or that artwork with their tablet or cell phone and walk away --- just walk away. There is no attempt to reckon with the actual thing in front of them. They may as well have stayed home and browsed the collection online. To stand before a 14th-century polychromed Christian sculpture of Saint Peter is to see the physical work of someone who lived and thought and created 700 years ago ---  the grain of the wood, the way the features are carved by hand and gessoed, the way the paint was applied. You see it from the side and their lack of understanding about anatomy and the depth of their faith are all there. That is not something that is recorded in a quick snapshot on a cell phone. But no one cares.

We no longer consider the reproduction to be something to refer to when the original is not available to see. The reproduction is now an acceptable, maybe even preferable, substitute for the original. Why bother standing in front of the physical object itself when you can look at a photo of it (if the photo is ever looked at)? Who cares about the one-on-one interaction that is only possible with the actual thing? Maybe the comment about this, made to me by someone recently, that these pictures are probably just to post on Facebook to appear "cool", is accurate.